Zero Beat 08-2014

The Police Precinct is at 6850 Whitten Bend Cove. See the web page for a detailed map.

Program

The program this month is a little off the beaten path. It is about WLW and construction of the first 500,000 watt clear channel AM radio station in Mason Ohio back in the late 20’s and early 30’s. Ron Rubin picked up a DVD at Dayton this year and I found it extremely interesting. It highlights some of the industrial quality engineering required for a transmitter of this size. At the time this was a major engineering feat.

Field Day

Short of miserable weather, Field Day was a good time. Lightening and heavy rain hampered operation but we still managed to eat well and have a good time. 110 people signed in. District Attorney Amy Wierich visited with several of us on Saturday morning and Tennessee Section Manager Keith Miller visited Saturday night and Sunday morning. Keith was on David Saks radio show Saturday night for nearly 2 hours discussing ham radio and the ARRL. Upcoming Public Service Event

There is an upcoming Elvis Presley 5K run around Graceland on August 16, from around 8 am to noon, for the Livitup Foundation. Livitup works with mentally challenged adults in the 18-70 year range. Unfortunately it is on the same weekend as the Huntsville Hamfest and many of us will be at Huntsville. Denise Ganucheau is heading it up and still needs 4-5 volunteers. It is a relatively short event and should not require a lot of time. Please see if you can help and drop Denise an email at kj5dg@arrl.net. Information about the event and Livitup can be found at http://elvispresleyrunandwalk.com/index.cfm.

Upcoming meetings.

We have to vacate the police precinct in Sept, Oct, and November because of training. We will probably meet at the pool clubhouse in September and October It was frosty in November so will try to find a place with some heat. We’ll keep you posted on plans so stay tuned.

Repeater Upgrades and Status

We have been meeting to decide a path forward on repeaters. It is a work in progress so stay tuned. The club has 16 repeaters and this is simply too many. Many are older and require an advanced level of technical expertise to maintain them. We are moving toward standardizing on Kenwood TKR series for UHF and VHF. The club recently bought 2 Kenwood TKR-750 VHF repeaters. They are much newer and easier to work on than the older Motorola’s. They are also easy to program with a laptop or netbook. The general plan is to keep the 2 Moto’s for 900 MHz and the GE for 6 meters and have Kenwoods for all else.

Our first move is done. We installed a Kenwood TKR-851 with a 50 watt continuous duty amp at LEBH. We also changed out the old Stationmaster type antenna [8 dB Omni gain]. The new antenna is an Andrew- Decibel DB420B. We shifted the pattern so it is slightly peaked east and west. Charts show about 12.4 dB east/west and 9 north/south. Readings from Ron Rubin and Roger Schlichter show excellent coverage out east. I can consistently hit it with my 4 watt Yaesu VX-5R from my driveway on the south east side of Bartlett.

The Kenwoods are easy to program but only put out about 25-30 watts continuous so we are looking for continuous duty amplifiers with 20-30 watts in and around 70 watts out.

We will be taking several of the older repeaters to Huntsville to sell. We will be actively marketing them in the coming months.

The 6 meter is working fine on 53.450 with 107.2 tone. I get the “dumb ass” award for reporting a problem. I had the input and output reversed in my HT. Antenna is commercial but has gain of 1dB. We are looking at some antennas with a little more gain but 6 meter antennas can get large quickly.